Re: [PATCH] fs: push sync_filesystem() down to the file system's remount_fs()

[Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>]

Hi,

On Thu, 2014-03-13 at 17:23 +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Thu 13-03-14 10:20:56, Ted Tso wrote:
> > Previously, the no-op "mount -o mount /dev/xxx" operation when the
>                                   ^^remount
> 
> > file system is already mounted read-write causes an implied,
> > unconditional syncfs().  This seems pretty stupid, and it's certainly
> > documented or guaraunteed to do this, nor is it particularly useful,
> > except in the case where the file system was mounted rw and is getting
> > remounted read-only.
> > 
> > However, it's possible that there might be some file systems that are
> > actually depending on this behavior.  In most file systems, it's
> > probably fine to only call sync_filesystem() when transitioning from
> > read-write to read-only, and there are some file systems where this is
> > not needed at all (for example, for a pseudo-filesystem or something
> > like romfs).
>   Hum, I'd avoid this excercise at least for filesystem where
> sync_filesystem() is obviously useless - proc, debugfs, pstore, devpts,
> also always read-only filesystems such as isofs, qnx4, qnx6, befs, cramfs,
> efs, freevxfs, romfs, squashfs. I think you can find a couple more which
> clearly don't care about sync_filesystem() if you look a bit closer.
> 
>
> 								Honza

I guess the same is true for other file systems which are mounted ro
too. So maybe a check for MS_RDONLY before doing the sync in those
cases?

Steve.